Rose Hill football
July 10, 2008 @ 11:14 a.m. by Joannaby joanna
Talked with Rose Hill coach Greg Slade this morning for another story, but thought I’d get some info to pass on to you all about his team’s summer.
Here you go:
Rose Hill had its team camp the first week of the summer and then he took two high school players (Tyler Shirley and Corey Shields) and three middle school players to the Jeff Trickey quarterback camp near St. Louis.
“I took my son last year, so I’ve been there two years and I’m pushing Coach Trickey to have a camp in this area. He’s quite the motivator, too.”
They went to that came for two days then went to Hutchinson for a contact camp.
Now the Rockets are deep into their lifting program, which they do three days a week.
“This year we divided our group, our varsity, our seniors through sophomores, into three groups and broke them up kind of by fast guys, medium-sized guys that are your linebacker types and then offensive line, defensive line types.
(That way) you have kids that are more equal as far as lifting, speed. (Specific coaches then work with each group and most of the time all five coaches are there.)
“Right now right now we have over 200 kids (boys and girls) lifting in our summer program. That’s 7th-12 and that’s about a quarter of our enrollment. And like right now, we have 70 middle school kids out here while I’m talking to you. The great thing about it is, there’s 5 coaches here still.”
He said the program has been getting this many kids for the past 5, 6 years. But when he started in 1998, he had 25 kids total. (Rose Hill went 1-17 in Slade’s first two years. The Rockets’ 5-4 record in 2000 was its first winning season since 1989. Last year’s 4-6 record broke a 7 year streak of winning records but was the fourth straight year they’d been to the playoffs.)
“And about 15 of those kids were high school football players. It really has changed the attitude of all of our sports. I’m looking at the middle school girls and there’s 16 of them here today.
We concentrate more on speed with the middle school kids and not in the weight room until they’re older.
“In the morning we run 4 sessions and then our soccer coach comes in at 3:30 with his kids and we have an evening session. We went June 18th and we’ll go up to the week before school starts. The last day is Aug. 7th.”
